Chapter 10 #4
She turned into the base leg, white-knuckling the stick and throttle as she sank into the worst of the dust cloud, and the air turned an eerie glowing brown color around her.
Her brother’s voice, as he’d taught her to fly through snowstorms back home, came to her.
“Picture the field ahead of you and fly right to it. Trust your gut.”
She knew where the narrow strip of dirt was from her glimpse of it on downwind.
Now, she just had to keep its position fixed in her mind and fly to it.
Flying totally by the seat of her pants, she banked onto final.
She rolled out of the turn when her bobbing compass said she was heading due west. She pushed her nose down more steeply and pulled off more power.
This was it. She’d committed to the landing now.
No time for second-guessing. She either went for the prize or got out of the way and watched while the others made history.
She craned her neck to look over the side of the fuselage. Any second now, something would pop out of the brown haze right below her or right beside her. She had to be ready to react fast to whatever it turned out to be. She prayed it was an open strip of dirt.
She felt the warm imprint of the little gold cross she wore around her neck. Was that sensation meant as comfort or a warning? There was no time to contemplate it.
There. The ground. Coming up fast.
Too fast!
She had no time to react, to pull her nose up.
She hit the ground. It was a hard impact that slammed her chin down onto her chest and sent a hard jolt through her tailbone and up her spine.
She tasted blood on her tongue but ignored it as she fought to keep her plane rolling down the center of a dirt strip barely wider than her wings. This was sheer madness!
Even over her engine’s noise, she heard the spectators’ roar. They had no idea how much they ought to be cheering her landing. It was a miracle she hadn’t plowed through hundreds of them with her propeller and chopped them into tiny bits.
Marvel stood on her brakes, bracing herself against the seat back to push even harder as she fought to stop the aircraft before she hit the idiots clustered at the far end of the runway.
The spectators had cut many hundreds of feet off the runway, making what should have been an easy landing rollout a deadly proposition.
A pair of race officials wearing white overalls frantically waved their flags at her.
Duh. She could see the crowd cheering obliviously in front of her.
One of the men signaled for her to turn left and clear the runway.
Quickly. Marvel fed in left rudder with the foot pedal to turn the plane.
The landings were supposed to be one minute apart.
She hadn’t been on the ground more than fifteen or twenty seconds, but apparently the next plane was already landing behind her.
As she turned, her propeller threatened the spectators who’d rushed into the gap left by the last plane.
They cringed back, shoving those behind them hard enough to open a narrow passageway through the wall of people.
The hole was just wide enough for her wings.
People reached out to touch her wingtips as she taxied past them.
What a chaotic mess. She finally cleared the thick crowd and taxied without further trouble over to the parking area with the other airplanes that had already landed.
As a marshaler with a set of small hand flags waved her over to a parking spot next to Gladys.
O’Donnell’s Waco 10, Marvel let out the breath she was pretty sure she’d been holding since somewhere on final approach.
Her hands ached but she couldn’t force herself to loosen her death grip on the controls.
That landing had been like threading a needle while going a hundred miles per hour and blind, with thousands of people about to die if she missed putting the thread through the needle’s eye.
It was sheer lunacy for the local race officials not to have kept the crowd back or cleared it from the runway once the race began. Only boneheaded ignorance could explain such an oversight.
Or hunger for profit . . .
Still in her cockpit, Marvel could indulge her disgust. She felt her face twisted in an expression of pure rage. She would have to smooth it out before she was seen. The only way she and other women were going to get ahead was by showing the world they could remain calm under pressure.
Maybe someday she’d get the chance to speak her mind and have it respected.
She rolled into her parking place as a roar from the crowd announced that the plane behind her had just touched down. Holding her breath again, she waited for a chorus of screams and cries for help indicating the next pilot wasn’t as lucky as she had been.
Marvel shut her engine down and fumbled with her seat belt, intent on getting out of her plane and heading to the landing strip to tell the spectators to get back.
Dumping her map on the cockpit floor, she stood up fast, intent on making the spectators aware of how dangerous their location was.
She noted Pancho and Louise also climbing out of their planes with alarm.
She didn’t wait for a ladder but instead jumped to the ground.
Pancho and Louise ran past the nose of her plane, and she took off after them.
She caught up just as they cleared the row of parked airplanes.
She stumbled to a stop, staring in shock.
Pancho and Louise had come to dismayed halts beside her.
Now that she had a clear view of the assembled crowd, the bottom of her stomach dropped out.
She’d thought the crowd at Clover Field was large, but this crowd dwarfed it.
And this was a much smaller and tighter airfield for all the spectators to pack into.
There was nowhere else for the thousands of people jammed up against the edge of the airstrip to go.
As far as she could see, Marvel saw nothing but a tightly packed sea of humanity.
No way were they going to make it through that mass of bodies, let alone help clear the runway. There was nowhere else for the people to go.
A drone of an airplane engine at the approach end of the runway made her turn sharply to watch. That was Opal Kunz’s plane emerging from the brown haze on short final.
But Opal’s nose was already pulling up in a flare, and she heard Opal throttle back.
No, no, no. Too soon!
Opal was going to pancake the landing.
Hard enough to wreck her plane.